With an average of 6,000 tweets per second, or 500 million tweets a day, Twitter can be an overwhelming source of information. Even if you have crafted a finely tuned list of people to follow that's not too big and not too small but just right, your feed can often obscure useful or interesting tweets and tidbits with a seemingly unyielding stream of jibber jabber.

Thankfully, Twitter has a powerful search tool, and you don't need a Twitter account to use it. Just head to Twitter's search page and do one of two things.

1. Use search operators

Twitter lets you refine your search with a number of useful search operators. A list of examples can be accessed from Twitter's main search page.

Photo by Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

2. Use advanced search

If you'd rather fill out a few fields to refine your search query than commit a search operator or two to memory, then click the advanced search link on the main search page where you can narrow search parameters for words, people, places, and dates. And at the bottom, you can even filter by attitude to include only tweets deemed positive or negative.